Makerspaces, especially in their diverse proliferating forms, support a broad variety of learning outcomes. There is rich work in attempting to understand and describe these learning goals. Yet, there is a lack of support for practitioners and educators to assess the learning in events and programming at makerspaces (and similar environments)…

While the provision of peer feedback has been widely recommended to enhance learning, many students are inexperienced in this area and would benefit from guidance. This study therefore examines the impact of instructions and examples on the quality of feedback provided by students on peer-developed learning resources produced via an online system,…

This study investigated the impact of participating in a year-long digital-fabrication course on high-school seniors' problem-solving skills, with a focus on problems involving mechanistic systems. The research questions centered on whether working in a makerspace impacted students' abilities to solve such problems and whether the process data…

Maker education provides the perfect context for young learners to develop 21st-century skills. However, research is inconclusive on how these skills could be assessed. Namely, the complex nature of 21st-century skills requires different types of assessments, not necessarily relying on paper-and-pencil or multiple-choice tests, but rather drawing…

In recent years, online learning has become more and more popular. However, because of information overload, learners often find it difficult to retrieve suitable learning resources. Although many scholars have proposed excellent online learning resource recommendation algorithms, the accuracy of personalized recommendation results still needs to…

Public libraries have embraced the popularity of maker education and makerspaces by integrating maker education in their program offerings, and by developing makerspaces that enable patrons to tinker and create products. But less attention has been paid to supporting librarians and maker educators in assessing the impact of these spaces. To expand…

Amidst this era of rapid technological advancement, the impact of White dominance in STEM causes inequity throughout the design, implementation, and function of modern technologies. Evidence of this includes AI systems that perpetuate racial and gender biases, medical devices that are incompatible with non-White medical needs, and hiring…

Agency is a core pedagogical goal of the maker education movement. However, there are still many unknowns about how agency is identified in maker settings. To document maker educator professional visions of agency, we conducted video-cued interviews with eleven U.S-based maker educators using video clips of families making in a drop-in…

With the Maker movement increasingly adopted across K-12 schools and non-formal makerspaces, students are being given more opportunities to engage in Making activities using tools such as robots, electronics, arts, and crafts. Making activities are thought to help students develop twenty-first-century skills, especially communication and…

Despite recent efforts to support learners from traditionally minoritized backgrounds in mathematics, inequities in math achievement and participation still exist, particularly for women and people of color. Additionally, much of how math is taught in schools aligns with a particular epistemology that comes from western mathematicians and…

A qualitative study was conducted in a secondary school to evaluate student learning processes and outcomes by examining their inquiry questions, journals, and maker artifacts in a curriculum-based maker learning environment supported by the Guided Inquiry Design (GID). Thirteen 8th-grade students in a suburban middle school in the southwest of…

Makerspaces persist as formal and informal spaces of learning for youth, promoting continued interest in studying how design can support the variety of learning opportunities within these spaces. However, much of the current research examining learning in makerspaces neglects the perspectives of educators. This not only hinders our understanding…

The emergence of immersive VR technology in K-12 educational spaces has created a need for research examining the affordances and constraints of this technology for student learning. The current study uses a case-study methodology to illustrate K-12 secondary science teachers' perceived affordances and constraints of using immersive VR tools to…

Whether or not offering undergraduate educational technology (EdTech) programs has been discussed in the field of educational technology. Some researchers suggested offering EdTech programs at the undergraduate level. This study answered this question by examining how Chinese undergraduate EdTech students perceived their satisfaction with their…

The rapid advancements in online education have pointed to a new open learning approach using Open Educational Resources (OER). In this approach, educators and learners can freely access or redistribute educational resources that have been released online in the public domain under an open license. Whereas this approach looks appealing in reducing…